Writing Online
See me sink: a branch pulled under. How caught
I must look. The depth’s invisible. I’m dead weight. . .
In 2012, the Belly Button Biodiversity project, a group of scientists exploring the bacterial habitat of the human navel, published their first peer-reviewed paper. They had swabbed 60 navels and found over 2,300 species of bacteria; of those, 1,458 “may be new to science.” Commonality was rare: only eight phylotypes appeared in more than 70% of participants. One person’s navel “harbored a bacterium that had previous been found only in soil from Japan,” where he had never been; another two navels had “extremophile bacteria that typically thrive in ice caps and thermal vents,” places inaccessible to the human body. The vast majority were lonely travelers: they appeared only in one belly button. As it happens, what our navels share may be rare and far-flung.
Essay; Cleaver
Recently, I ruined someone’s moment of mundane joy. The hallways of my campus building were bare—students were taking exams, or locked away in the library and various study nooks they’d marked as their territory, or sprawled on the campus greens. The end of the semester was nigh; my step had a lilt.
Essay; The Southeast Review
There may be nothing new under the sun, but that doesn’t mean we’ve seen or said it all.
Humans see three primary colors; the butterfly perhaps five; the mantis shrimp, a radiant and violent sea creature, perhaps twelve. Bees can detect ultraviolet light. The Himba people, an indigenous group in Namibia, can distinguish between shades of green that other humans can’t.
It’s a human tendency to see one likeness between two people and to assume that likeness implies many more. That narrow identification arose after the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, an epistle to his son that is a memoir and a personal intellectual history. Between the World and Me is formally modeled after James Baldwin’s essay “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,” the first of two essays in Baldwin’s remarkable The Fire Next Time; that formal likeness, combined with Toni Morrison’s lone dust-jacket blurb comparing Coates to Baldwin, led almost every reviewer to make the same comparison, usually positively. A qualitative comparison is, essentially, impossible; for us, Baldwin is a figure with a life-long bibliography of stellar essays, stories, and novels. Coates’s career is young, with two books, his writing for The Atlantic, and authorship of a Black Panther comic book series.